A Space of His Own
by shylittleghost
Summary: As the revolution comes to a close, Logan slowly realizes that his communication issues nearly resulted in the kingdom's ruin. Without his crown to hide behind, he must resolve his personal problems if he's to gain the trust of Albion's new queen.


A Space of His Own

After the flushed young page burst into the throne room to inform him between shallow breaths of the siege upon Bowerstone, Logan ordered all personnel from the war room and locked the door behind him. His men were on their own now; not that Albion's king could do much now to prevent the coming storm.

Long had he foreseen the coming of an enemy against his gates, though he never would have predicted the siege would come under his sister's banner. The Crawler would have been far easier to deal with, he admitted (demonic beings, apparently, did not frighten him nearly as much as having to confront his own people, let alone his own flesh and blood, did), but nonetheless he was somehow relieved.

He'd known that discontent went about the people, but fathomed not the extent to which it buried itself into the country's roots, updoing in a matter of months what he'd spent years carefully tending and growing. What uprisings had occurred he considered little more than isolated instances, easily dealt with by means of a few carefully executed snips of the garden sheers. He found it troubling that so much sorrow, pain, and anger had been allowed to fester, and that he had been largely unaware of it (but then again, he never _did_ have the knack for empathy, not the way Tabitha did). A voice in his head murmured, _And if you did know, what of it? What could you have done, short of divulging everything you knew about __**it**_?

And that he could never do, no more than he could bear to surrender his country to the coming darkness. No, he was too weak a man to ever do such a thing (too weak a king; he was nothing but a cast-off shadow of his father, and he was certainly not a hero).

Logan wandered down the castle's corridors, which in the absence of his staff were quiet and dark, the candles having been allowed to burn down to the wick. From the portraits which lined the walls, his ancestors gazed down impassively at him. He was conscious not to make eye contact with any of these heroes of yore, keeping his eyes fixed ahead as he unlocked the door to his bedroom. _I'm sorry_, _I'm sorry, _the voice echoed inside his head, _if only, if only…_

Then the bedroom door was shut behind him and the voices fell silent.

When he was still a child taken to fits of uncharacteristic dolor (which he never did grow out of), when the loud noises and people and crush of the castle would reduce him to a shattered hull (which they still did), his mother took him aside one day and lead him by the hand to his bedroom. Once she was satisfied that he was settled on the bed, neatly wrapped up in a thick quilt, she had told him, "You're different from the others, Loggie. You need your space – you've been that way ever since you were a babe."

"But mother, why?" Logan asked, suddenly seized with the idea that he might be severely ill. To that effect, he added, in a much lower voice, "I'm not going to _die_, am I?"

At that, his mother gave a good-hearted chuckle. "No, you are perfectly wonderful. Some people just don't get on so well with others, and you're one of those people. There's nothing at all wrong with it – you might even grow out of it, for all we know." She then ruffled his hair (he'd flinched; he never was one for physical contact). "If you ever get in a worry again, just sit tight in your room for a bit."

She clasped her hands together before her, forming a circle with her arms. "This is your safe space, Loggie," she said, clenching her fists for emphasis.

"This is my safe space," an adult Logan repeated. He was sitting on the corner of his bed – the same bed where he and his mother had carried out that conversation so many years ago.

He shut his window, shuttering out the din below from the meeting betwixt Tabitha's army and the city's guard, and curled up on his bed, pulling a familiar quilt over his lap. He lit a candle and proceeded to indulge himself in a book he'd been meaning to read for a long time. The past year or so of anxiety over the Crawler had done irreparable damage to his leisure time – he seldom found time to sleep these days, let alone open a book.

It was all over now, and for the first time in a year he was free to come here, to his own safe space, and just let go. All the anxiety which had built up (creeping to the surface in meetings with his generals or in his addresses to the people, when the careful façade would break down and he would stumble over his words, avert his eyes, do _anything_ to run away from the people, the noise, the light of the public eye…) crumbled slowly and dissolved in the pages of the book he cradled in his hands with far more tenderness than he ever had any human being.

When Tabitha and Walter first bashed down the door, Logan drew his sword instinctively, but promptly put it away when he saw the look on Tabitha's face. He was rubbish at divining what others thought or felt, but from the way his sister's mouth gaped in a sad little 'O' and the skin between her eyebrows crumbled, it was obvious that she certainly wasn't in the mood to kill him… yet.

Then Tabitha's voice was rising, and with tears in her eyes she spat, "You were never a leader – just another tyrant!" (perhaps she _would_ kill him now), and it was then that Logan decided there was no way to skirt around the elephant in the room any longer.

"You deserve to know the truth," he said, but neither Tabitha nor Walter seemed interested. Logan decided it was best to keep quiet, just for now – his mother had often told him that people sometimes needed time to _"cool down"_, and Logan _did_ have a have a habit of speaking at the most inopportune and in appropriate times.

Happily, Tabitha didn't run him through on the spot and he was escorted to his room where, under relentless surveillance, he spent the rest of the week awaiting his execution (and why would Tabitha chose otherwise? An execution would tie up all those nasty little ends; it was the only logical thing to do). He would have his opportunity to appear before his sister then, and that was all that mattered. He would finally be able to tell her everything he knew about the Crawler, and she would be able to succeed where he had so magnificently made a failure of himself. He had hoped to avoid this day, but he was out of options now.

The day of the trial arrived, and in front of the assembled court (how he wished they could have carried out business in private, and not in this open space with so many _minds_ focused upon him), Logan hurriedly revealed his encounter with the Crawler, disclosing the impending fate of Albion that he had spent the last couple years so aggressively trying to avoid. Tabitha watched with half-lidded eyes, one cheek resting against her balled fist. He wished she knew what she was thinking, what she was feeling, and it frustrated him to no end that he could not. Thus, at the end of his tangent, he put the choice before her and lowered his head, waiting quietly for the axe (figurative and literal both, in this case) to fall.

He thought it was his hopeful imagination conspiring against him when he heard his sister pronounce her pardon. No, his mind was definitely in order. A hot flush spread across his cheeks, equal parts flustered thankfulness and shame – were he in Tabitha's position, the outcome would have been drastically different.

When the trial was over, Logan thought he'd seen the end of it, believed he was now free to fade into the background until the Crawler emerged. To his disappointment, Tabitha caught him by the elbow later that day in the middle of the corridor, her face a peculiar shade of pink.

"Why did you do it?" Logan found himself blurting out. It surprised him – he was rarely one to ask the questions.

"Do what?"

"You pardoned me," the words rushed out all at once, tripping over one another, "You pardoned me, you shouldn't have. The kingdom would be better off with me gone. I don't mean to sound ungrateful, sister – I am in your debt, after all – but what you did in there was hardly logical."

Even Logan could not miss the cold anger that flashed forth in Tabitha's answer. "You're my _brother_, Logan. I was not going to allow them to put you to death under my orders. As foreign as it may sound to you, people do have reasons for caring about one another that are not particularly rational."

Logan panicked, unable to discern whether Tabitha was genuinely upset for reasons he could not comprehend, or if he had offended her. "I never meant – ."

"Oh, I'm sure you meant every little bit of what you said, Logan. If you cared for me at all, you would have told me about the Crawler the moment you knew. I could have helped you."

"I could have done no such thing."

Tabitha pursed her lips and glared at him, forcing Logan to look away, both hands tightly gathered into fists at his sides. It was not in his disposition to bear scrutiny. "You could at least," she said, pronouncing each word deliberately, "do me the honor of explaining _why_."

With the Crawler, at least, Logan needed only to rattle off what he knew and that was that. The disconnect between his brain and his mouth was not so severe when all he needed to do was regurgitate information. When it came to how he _felt, _however, Logan instantly and completely dissembled. It was a titanic feat to put voice what his brain could not even catalogue by conventional means of words and phrases. As desperately as he wished to convey his sentiments to Tabitha, even to himself his feelings were vague and shapeless, and after several half stammered, circular attempts to give shape to his feelings ("I just _couldn't_ because I simply could not."), Tabitha gave up and abandoned in the corridor to wring his hands white.

_You are foolish, foolish, foolish, Logan._

Logan hurried to his room and barred the door behind him. Once settled in his safety blanket, taking deep breaths until his heart rate settled to a steady drum, he pulled the chest he kept by his bedside into his lap and proceeded to sift through its contents. A carefully laminated parchment caught his attention, so he plucked it from the stack to better study it. It was one of his earlier speeches – a first print edition, no less – written before the whole Crawler affair.

As he read through the speech, Logan knotted his free hand into the old quilt, absentmindedly tugging at the loose fibers. He could scarcely believe that he was the same man whose words flowed so eloquently on paper, when he could not even carry on a proper conversation with Tabitha.

And that gave Logan a simply _tremendous _idea.

The quilt still wrapped about his shoulders, he hobbled over to his writing desk and pulled out a fresh sheet of paper, an ink pot, and his writing quill. Dabbing quill in ink (being careful, as he always was, to gently tap the quill against the lip of the pot first to shake free any excess ink that might blot the paper), Logan began to write.

From a purely superficial observation, one would never conclude that Logan could ever be what one might consider a _connoisseur _of the fine arts. He carried with him all the bearing of a hard and calloused man, dressed unartfully as he was in a king's (not a king anymore, though he still dressed the part) regimental garment, a sour look perpetually on his face. In fact, Logan had always been a fan of Albion's finer painters, and even kept a few of his favorites hung in his bedroom. While he was by no stretch of the imagination a good judge of aesthetic value, there was something in the way in which a talented painter could use the physical to give expression to ideas the tongue could not voice, which appealed to Logan.

Logan could not paint, but he could certainly write.

The quill scratched busily against the paper, each letter giving shape to that which he could not speak. Logan wrote and wrote, burning through and entire box of candlesticks, until all the formless phantoms that had too long flitted about his head were captured and locked away on paper. Then, scrubbing a hand through his greasy, raven hair, he read over his work, allowing himself a minute smile.

_My Dearest Sister,_

_ In the corridor earlier, I attempted to give you an explanation of my reasons for withholding information concerning the Crawler from you. I agree wholeheartedly with you that an explanation, indeed, is not only in order, but owed. You have been far too gracious with me as of late; your forgiveness, which I had never expected you to proffer, was all the generosity I'd ever hoped for: your mercy was in excess._

_ I do hope that you do not find this mode of communication too impersonal. If I could have simply expressed myself to you back then in the corridor, as normal people are want to do, then know I would have done so barring any hesitation._

_ Unfortunately, my sister, I am not like most other people. What comes easy to them naturally does not do so to me; if it did, we would not be in the peril we stand now to face at all. _

_ When I learned of the Crawler's existence, I was alone. My rule, you must understand, has been one of loneliness. It should not surprise you, then, that I took this new burden upon myself as my responsibility and my responsibility alone. It was not a matter of trust, though as you may by now have realized I am defective in my ability to place my trust in others, otherwise I would have known to trust you. Rather, I withheld my knowledge on a matter of principle. I am, and have always been, a creature of self-occupation. I saw the Crawler as my own problem, my own burden, and set about finding a resolution by any means possible. So involved was I with my own goals, that I failed to notice the impact it had on my people. I will not soften the truth from you; I was, as you said that day we were reunited, a tyrant unto them._

_ But you are not like me, Tabitha. You can see what I failed to observe, and you can lead Albion in the spirit of enlightenment and empathy. You are a leader, not of a kingdom, but of a people – which is why you are the hero I could never be. I have every ounce of confidence in your ability to succeed where I have failed, and know that I do not in the least resent you for it. I wish only that I were not as I am. It was unfortunate, to say the least, that, as the eldest, I was to take upon myself the burden which nature never intended for me to bear._

_ Though I am often unable to say it to you in person, know that I love you dearly. I was not lying to you when I said you'd become the young woman I always hoped you would become, and there's no end to the pride I feel on your behalf._

_ With warm regards,_

_ You brother, Logan._

He slipped the letter into an envelope, impressed it with the royal seal, and had a servant carry it off to his sister's private quarters.

Over the next month, not a word came from his sister's end, but Logan was not bothered. These would be trying times for Tabitha; he could expect nothing less than her complete and total occupation with the monumental task placed before her. He even felt a twang of guilt. The poor girl could never have guessed what she was getting herself into!

Then, when Logan was locked in his bedroom one day, engaged with the utmost attention in a map of Albion, he heard a soft rap at the door.

"Logan," Tabitha's voice called out, "May I come in?"

Logan's chest tightened. No one had been allowed in his safe space since his mother's death. "No!" he cried out, and then added, calmer, "Just a minute, I'll be right there."

When he opened the door, he found Tabitha waiting for him, just as she'd been instructed to do. She looked every bit like the weight of the world was upon her shoulders: her face was long and haggard, dark bags clinging to the undersides of her eyes. Another twang of guilt pricked Logan.

"I got your letter," Tabitha informed him. Her voice was a touch rougher than usually –the result of a cold, most likely. "I've been hanging onto it for a few weeks now. In retrospect I suppose I really should have come to you earlier but…"

Logan nodded, trying his best to look understanding. "I know. The burden you bear is not light; it will take your all to overcome."

A bitter smile creased Tabitha's lips. "It _has_ been hard; far more than I ever expected. I've been trying my best to keep to all my promises, but let's just say the Crawler's made it difficult. I've been working my ass off to pick up the slack too, but sometimes… sometimes I'm worried it won't be enough." The color momentarily fled from her face. "You know how it is, I guess. I'm surprised you kept your head at all, with all you had stacked up against you."

"You will do fine, sister. The people love you; you have their support."

"Yes, I suppose I do." Silence slipped between them (he growing more uncomfortable all the while, on the threshold of his safe space but unable to retreat into it).

Then, Tabitha spoke, "I never knew you felt… well..." A hand reached out to touch his cheek. "If you ever need someone to, er, talk to, Loggie…"

At the use of _that_ term of endearment (hadn't heard it used in so long, not since mother, and never from Tabitha), Logan's brain promptly fractured. He was never the best at finding a conductive way of dealing with his emotions, and so they bounced around in his head like shrieking banshees. _!_

And retreat was exactly what Logan did, fleeing back into his safe space. He wasn't quick enough, though, and Tabitha slipped through the door before he could close it behind him.

"Logan!" she exclaimed. "What's wrong?"

Logan starred at her, dark eyes wide and wild. Mechanically, he swung one arm around, indicating the surrounding room. "This," he blurted, "is my safe space."

Tabitha opened her mouth, and Logan expected her to demand an explanation from him – and then they'd be right back where they'd started in the corridor a month ago, him reduced to a dumb, stuttering mess.

"Do you want me to leave, Loggie?"

Surprised, Logan glanced up. Tabitha _did _seem perhaps a tad curious, a tad frustrated, but he could tell she was trying her best to hold that bit back, instead ushering all her might into giving him the most earnest, understanding look she could manage.

Then, for the first time in his life, the barrier between Logan's brain and his mouth flung open and he was marvellously, shamelessly, vomiting up every thought that came into his head.

They ended up on his bed, Logan wrapped in his quilt with his head in Tabitha's lap, her fingers dragging slow lines across his scalp as he told her everything. He told her about how their mother took him aside that one day and told him about having his own safe space, about his trouble with people, about his frustrations at his inability to relate to said people, and about the way his thoughts became so fumbled and entangled at times that it left him a disassembled, stuttering mess. He even rattled off all his obscure hobbies which kept his mind off the things which troubled him so. Most people grew bored of Logan pretty quickly whenever he launched into one of his tangents about map making or obscure tragicomic playwrites, but not Tabitha – she stayed by his side the whole time, making encouraging little noises every so often.

When he began to speak of the Crawler, of _his encounter_ with the creature, Tabitha suddenly flung her arms around him.

Logan froze (didn't she remember what he said about physical contact?), but decided against putting up a fight, if only for this one time.

The way Tabitha's arms closed around him, hands locked together, reminded him of the first time his mother had introduced him to his safe space, of the way she had clasped her arms together in a circle when she spoken of Logan's need to find a place where he could be insulated from all the turmoil of the outside would that would undo him so.

Encircled as he was in Tabitha's arms (as much as he balked at admitting it), Logan did indeed feel _very _safe.

The End


End file.
